The Internet is a worldwide public system of computer networks providing information, shopping capabilities and other kinds of business opportunities accessible to tens of millions of people worldwide. The most widely used part of the Internet is the World Wide Web, often abbreviated “WWW” or simply referred to as just “the web.” The web is an Internet service that organizes information through the use of hypermedia. The HyperText Markup Language (“HTML”) is typically used to specify the contents and format of a hypermedia document (e.g., a web page). Other popular formats to display contents of a web page are JAVA™, the Portable Document Format (PDF), AJAX, Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. Hypertext links refer to other documents by their universal resource locators (URLs). A client program, known as a browser, e.g. MICROSOFT® INTERNET EXPLORER®, GOOGLE® CHROME®, MOZILLA® FIREFOX®, APPLE® SAFARI®, runs on the user's computer and is used to render the content of a web page and display it in human readable form. The browser is also used to follow a link, e.g., send a query to the web server.
Browsers provide a base for the largest advertising marketplace in the world, the World Wide Web. A common way to gain market share in this market has proved to be through the homepage and the search provider of the browser. Since this market is a multi-billion dollar one, many companies have started to hunt for market share by resetting users' browsers to a certain search company. What began as normal competition has changed when mostly camouflaged offers, presented as “Opt-Out,” came to market, bundled with software that is not related to browsers or to search pages. One example of such an “Opt-Out” offer can be seen in FIG. 6, which shows an opt-out offer 602 that appears when installing JAVA. In order for the user to avoid having their default search provider (DSP) and homepage (HP) changed, the user must actively deselect the checkboxes 604.
Over time, the number and variety of such opt-out offers has become almost overwhelming to the point where much software installation software, whether for a PDF reader, CD-Burning software or JAVA, includes an opt-out offer that can result in an unwanted change to a user's previous choice of search provider and/or home page. An average user typically overlooks the pre-selected option to reset the search provider or homepage, typically thinking that keeping the checkboxes selected is the way to accept end-user license agreement (EULA) or privacy terms, or that the opt-out offer is a recommended option for the installed program.
Further, because many offers nowadays are camouflaged as opt-out (e.g., the user has to uncheck a setting if he doesn't want the offer), users that are in hurry and don't read or users that simply don't understand the connection between the desired program and the hijacking of the browser end up with a different and unwanted settings for the installed browsers on the user's computer.
The browsers (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Mozilla FireFox) typically do not offer any history of settings or an easy way to reset the hijacked settings back to previous values. Typically the only way to reset the browser that is offered by the browser itself is the one to the search settings the browser vendor monetizes best. Therefore a hijacked user has either to reset any of the installed browsers manually to the search settings the browser vendor monetizes or the user has to reset the single settings for homepage and search provider manually on each browser using settings that look different on each browser and that are technically quite complicated.